Sterling student spins the wheel March 4

Jennifer Bogosian
Family in Sterling and friends at UMass- Amherst will gather this week to watch Jennifer Bogosian of Sterling compete on Wheel of Fortune, in a show taped last December after Bogosian re-arranged her undergraduate finals schedule to spend a week in L.A.

“It was such a good experience and so much fun,” she says

Bogosian, a 2006 WRHS grad, now a marketing major in her senior year at the University of Massachusetts, hadn’t been one of Wheel of Fortune’s longtime loyal watchers. In fact, she admits, she only watched it with her UMass roommate, Andrea Medeiros, when the two were studying.

“I would only ever watch it in between classes on weekdays,” she says.

Medeiros teased Bogosian that she was going to sign her up.

“She told me after [she signed me up],” Bogosian recalls. “It was kind of a joke, because we never expected anything to happen.”

To their surprise, Bogosian was invited to attend the three rounds of a kind of audition in Boston in August, just days before her 21st birthday. Bogosian passed the test.

Her parents, Kathy and Brad, both of Sterling, at first didn’t believe it, she recalls. When reality sunk in, they were nothing but supportive.

“They said, ‘Definitely go for it,’” she recalls.

Show organizers originally wanted her to be on the college show, but already had a student from UMass. That fall, though, they decided Bogosian was the kind of person they wanted on the show anyway to compete with non-college contestants.

“I switched around all my finals and flew to L.A. with my brother,” Greg, she said.

On the way on the plane, Greg helped her prep the only way the two of them could figure out: Greg researched what the most common letters in the English language were, and made her study them.

It didn’t exactly prepare her; she went up against two other twenty-somethings who turned out to be stiff competition.

“They were already out of school and with full-time jobs, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m missing finals week, but I’m here,’” she said. “One of them was an avid Wheel of Fortune watcher. I was a little intimidated by that.”

Getting the hang of how to behave during the show, what to watch out for and what to do next, was also a little nerve-wracking she admits, but to Bogosian, the fun was uppermost.

When not taping the show, Bogosian and her brother got to do some typical Los Angeles sightseeing: Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, all the famous beaches, the La Brea Tar Pits.

She has only one regret about that part of the trip: it was always too cloudy to see the famous Hollywood sign.

Since the excitement of “Wheel of Fortune,” ended in December, Bogosian’s gone back to school, where she’s in her last semester studying marketing and hoping to go into event planning.

She can’t tell you the outcome of the show just yet; you’ll have to tune in to see her on WSBK-TV 38 at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 4.

However it turns out, Bogosian’s clear on how she feels about it: “I wouldn’t have traded that for the world.”